A World of His Own

"**A World of His Own**"
"A World of His Own"
The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.	Season 1; Episode 36
Directed by	Ralph Nelson
Written by	Richard Matheson
Production code	173-3634
Original air date	July 1, 1960
Guest appearances
	Keenan Wynn as Gregory West; Phyllis Kirk as Victoria West; Mary LaRoche as Mary;
Episode chronology
← Previous; "The Mighty Casey"	Next →; "King Nine Will Not Return"
	The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series, season 1)
	List of episodes

"A World of His Own" is episode thirty-six of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It was the last episode of the show's first season and essentially comedic in tone. It originally aired on July 1, 1960, on CBS.

Opening narration

The home of Mr. Gregory West, one of America's most noted playwrights. The office of Mr. Gregory West. Mr. Gregory West—shy, quiet, and at the moment, very happy. Mary—warm, affectionate...And the final ingredient: Mrs. Gregory West.

Plot

Coming home, Victoria West spots her husband, playwright Gregory West, through the window sharing a drink, and flirting in his study with Mary, an attractive young woman. Gregory quickly destroys a tape, which displeases Mary. When Victoria barges into the room, Mary is nowhere to be found.

Victoria looks around the room for hints of where she might have gone but does not yet confront him. Soon, she questions him. Gregory denies everything until Victoria throws in a trick, which causes him to admit the truth. Victoria is furious, but Gregory explains to his wife that any character that he describes into his dictation machine will appear according to his description. To make the character disappear, all he has to do is cut out that portion of the tape and throw it into his fireplace. Victoria doesn't believe him and is ready to divorce him and commit him to an asylum. Gregory demonstrates his power, summoning Mary again and "uncreating" her, but not before Mary requests that Gregory not bring her back again, as she has grown weary of her segmented existence. Appalled, Victoria tries to escape, but Gregory uses his power to summon an elephant to stop her. Gregory discovered this talent when Phillip Wainwright from his play “Fury in the Night,” whom he had put a great deal of effort and attention into approached him as a real flesh-and-blood person with his own independent will, shook his hand and thanked him.

Believing none of this, Victoria tells Gregory that he is insane and she is going to have him committed. In response, Gregory pulls a section of tape from his safe and explains that it contains her description, revealing her to be one of his creations, but that recently she has begun to exert her own independence from him. Refusing to believe him, Victoria snatches the tape away from him and throws it into the fire, and promptly begins to feel faint. She realizes too late he was telling the truth, and disappears as the flames consume the tape. Frantic, Gregory rushes to his dictation machine and begins to re-describe Victoria. He quickly reconsiders and instead describes Mrs. Mary West as his wife. Mary appears and fixes her husband a drink, apparently lacking any memory of her previous interval of existence.

Finale/closing narration

Rod Serling then appears on the set and says, "We hope you enjoyed tonight's romantic story on The Twilight Zone. At the same time, we want you to realize that it was, of course, purely fictional. In real life, such ridiculous nonsense could never—"

"Rod, you shouldn't!" interrupts Gregory, who walks over to his safe and pulls out a tape marked "Rod Serling." "I mean, you shouldn't say such things as 'nonsense' and 'ridiculous!'" he continues as he throws the envelope into the fire.

"Well, that's the way it goes," observes Serling as he fades away.

Nevertheless, as Gregory joins Mary in a drink, Serling's voice comes in at the epilogue as usual:

Leaving Mr. Gregory West—still shy, quiet, very happy... and apparently in complete control of The Twilight Zone.

Production notes

Writer Richard Matheson had previously written a short story, "And Now I'm Waiting", where a male narrator visiting an author discovers that he is an invention of the author. The story had a much darker tone and finish in its original form, and ultimately, Matheson chose to rework it into a domestic comedy when he pitched it as an episode to the series. Previously unreleased, the original story was ultimately published in Twilight Zone Magazine in April 1983.^[1]

Although Serling appeared on-screen at the end of most first season Twilight Zone episodes to plug the following week's show, this is the only episode in the first season in which Rod Serling appears on-screen within the episode itself (i.e., not in a separate "coming next week" segment) and directly interacts with a character from the episode. From the second season onward, Serling began to appear on-screen at the start of each episode.^{[citation needed]}

At the end of the first season, Kimberly-Clark discontinued their alternate sponsorship of the series. A new sponsor began alternating with General Foods that summer, Colgate-Palmolive, primarily on behalf of Colgate Dental Cream, as well as some of their other products (including "Veto" deodorant).^{[citation needed]}

Keenan Wynn was the son of vaudeville comedian Ed Wynn, who played Bookman in "One for the Angels" and Sam Forstmann in "Ninety Years Without Slumbering". Mary La Roche also starred as Annabelle Streator in the Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll".^[2]

References

^ Bradley, Matthew; Stuve, Paul; Wiater, Stanley (2009). The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. Stan Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, Paul Stuve. New York: Citadel Press/Kensington Pub. p. 253. ISBN 978-0-8065-3113-7. OCLC 302292027.
^ Melbye, David (2015). Irony in The Twilight Zone : how the series critiqued postwar American culture. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 182. ISBN 978-1-4422-6031-3. OCLC 920453722.

External links

"A World of His Own" at IMDb

[1] Bradley, Matthew; Stuve, Paul; Wiater, Stanley (2009). The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. Stan Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, Paul Stuve. New York: Citadel Press/Kensington Pub. p. 253. ISBN 978-0-8065-3113-7. OCLC 302292027.

[2] Melbye, David (2015). Irony in The Twilight Zone : how the series critiqued postwar American culture. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 182. ISBN 978-1-4422-6031-3. OCLC 920453722.

[1]

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v t e The Twilight Zone (1959) episodes
Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgment Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"
Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble with Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"
Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"
Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"
Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" "Steel" "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" "A Kind of a Stopwatch" "The Last Night of a Jockey" "Living Doll" "The Old Man in the Cave" "Uncle Simon" "Probe 7, Over and Out" "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" "Ring-a-Ding Girl" "You Drive" "The Long Morrow" "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" "Black Leather Jackets" "Night Call" "From Agnes—With Love" "Spur of the Moment" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" "Queen of the Nile" "What's in the Box" "The Masks" "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" "Sounds and Silences" "Caesar and Me" "The Jeopardy Room" "Stopover in a Quiet Town" "The Encounter" "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" "The Brain Center at Whipple's" "Come Wander with Me" "The Fear" "The Bewitchin' Pool"

v t e Richard Matheson
Novels	I Am Legend (1954) The Shrinking Man (1956) A Stir of Echoes (1958) The Beardless Warriors (1960) Hell House (1971) Bid Time Return (1975) What Dreams May Come (1978) Earthbound (1982)
Short stories	"Born of Man and Woman" (1950) "Button, Button" (1970)
Screenplays	The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) House of Usher (1960) "The Last Flight" (1960) "Nick of Time" (1960) "A World of Difference" (1960) "A World of His Own" (1960) Master of the World (1961) The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) "The Invaders" (1961) "Once Upon a Time" (1961) Night of the Eagle (1962) Tales of Terror (1962) "Little Girl Lost" (1962) "Young Man's Fancy" (1962) The Raven (1963) "Death Ship" (1963) "Mute" (1963) "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963) "Steel" (1963) The Comedy of Terrors (1964) The Last Man on Earth (1964) "Night Call" (1964) "Spur of the Moment" (1964) Fanatic (1965) The Young Warriors (1966) "The Enemy Within" (1966) The Devil Rides Out (1968) De Sade (1969) Duel (1971) The Night Stalker (1972) The Night Strangler (1973) The Legend of Hell House (1973) Dying Room Only (1973) Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974) The Morning After (1974) Scream of the Wolf (1974) Trilogy of Terror (1975) Dead of Night (1977) The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver (1977) The Martian Chronicles (1980) Somewhere in Time (1980) Jaws 3-D (1983) Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) "Button, Button" (1986) Loose Cannons (1990) The Dreamer of Oz (1990) Twilight Zone: Rod Serling's Lost Classics (1994) Trilogy of Terror II (1996)
Adaptations by others	"And When the Sky Was Opened" (1959) "Third from the Sun" (1960) Cold Sweat (1970) The Omega Man (1971) The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981) What Dreams May Come (1998) Stir of Echoes (1999) "Dance of the Dead" (2005) "My Ambition" (2006) I Am Legend (2007) I Am Omega (2007) The Box (2009) "The Splendid Source" (2010) Real Steel (2011)
Related	Richard Christian Matheson (son) Chris Matheson (son)